knp

Would you really want to pick a PhD committee at an institution and then to have all of its members leave before you graduate? That's still not probable at Madison, I think, but at any other institution it's probably impossible unless a meteorite comes plowing into a departmental meeting.

Ah, so, that program. I've heard about it, but I'm not sure: do you need to apply this year because you're associated with them and they will give you more money if you apply this year? Or is it a guilt thing for their past support? Would you going to a master's degree meet whatever criteria they have for what you should be doing next year? Can you apply to just one PhD program and a bunch of master's degrees, and have that 'count' for having tried to enter a PhD program? What if you apply and you don't get in, does that 'count'? I'm afraid, though, that I don't understand why you want to apply this fall. Why you have to, sure, but not the wanting. When I was graduated from college, I was also scared of what came next, and very interested in graduate school but full of too many emotions to approach it with the degree of emotional stability I wanted. (I.e., I waited to reach the point where I could get negative feedback on work or get rejected from more than half of the PhD programs to which I applied, including the first three that responded to me, and be only sad or disappointed, rather than going into a despair spiral.) So I made exactly the opposite decision from you: I waited to apply until the fear had receded. While with the diversity of human choice etc., I'm sure there are situations where the opposite decision from my own is the best one to make, I feel like I'm having trouble saying anything helpful. I could come up with lots of advice for how to apply this fall if we treat it as something unpleasant, something that's not ideal this year but that for external reasons you have to do, if you want that. But I'm stuck on how to square my philosophy that it's best to avoid things that will exponentially increase your misery quotient with you saying that even without this program, you'd want to apply again this fall. Do you feel you have gotten anything helpful out of this thread? I feel like I am not necessarily responding to the questions you are actually asking or most want answered, so if you ID those either I could take another try—not ideal—or hopefully somebody with more relevant opinions might swing through and respond to the update.

Me? Oh, lord, whatever.

Right, but can you happily handle applying again, teaching, and living in a foreign country where you don't know the language? (If you do speak Chinese fluently, the following is still going to apply if you haven't spent a lot of time in the country. If I've misread your profile/interests and you're a heritage speaker going to China to teach in a university in a city where you've spent every other summer your whole life and have a lot of family, never mind, carry on.) Because all three of those things are quite difficult. Applying to graduate school is emotionally taxing, and so are the first few years of teaching or of living in a new country. Are you in China yet? I flamed out of my one attempt to work abroad rather dramatically a couple years ago—in a new country, but in a language in which I was then very good—largely because I was making life more difficult for myself outside of work in ways that rather parallel the PhD application process. Look, I'm not saying don't do it, but I worry you're underestimating how big the transition to living in China is going to be. Not that the transition will be bad, just that it'll be time- and energy-consuming and that it might not leave enough time and/or energy left over to both apply to graduate school and to let you avoid falling into a situational depression. Does your university in China renew its contracts, ever? If yes I wouldn't take that possibility off the table until you've been working there for a few months. Final thoughts: 1) there are worse things than going to your ideal program after three years out of college—the same time I have taken—rather than only one. 2) If you do apply this year, maybe consider just applying to the odd-years PhD, or just that and like two master's degrees, and leave the full-scale effort for further down the line.

Going to live in a new country for an extended period of time is already a brave and scary step—it's okay to decide that taking on one major challenge this year is enough! I was taking on a huge new project last fall, but I couldn't hack both that and graduate school applications, so I ended up dropping the project. It might be wise to reserve a bit of emotional energy for your teaching and living efforts this year. I'm sure you could both teach at the university and apply to graduate school, but it also sounds, from the emotion words you used in your first post here, like doing so will make you miserable. Why not put off graduate school for a cycle and aim for less misery this year?

Oh, gosh, sweetheart...those questions are far too broad to get any useful help here. Can you not ask your professors, or look back at articles you read in old courses you took?

Hm, that still sounds kind of broad to me. I mean, of course you're not being as specific as you could be here, but "Latin America" is a huge topic of course. As for "migration," I'd encourage you to get to the point where the short form of your "my subject-matter interest" thing is either "x perspectives on migration (in region)" or "the intersection of migration and other topic (in region)." Luckily, you have a lot of months to do some reading and narrowing, if you're not there already and it just didn't come out in that post. It's definitely very variable by scholar, but for the access issue, I've found that anthropology is a bit better than my previous discipline about having recent papers available to read on academia.edu. Personally, I didn't bother even a little bit with considering which universities had good Regional Studies departments, but I study a somewhat offbeat corner of my region, so having a bang-up Relevant Continental Studies department is no guarantee that anybody in the department has ever spared a single thought for the countries I focus on. My subregion is well represented in my anthropology department, but I don't actually know whether the Continental Studies department at my future university is much good, or if there even is one. (I think there is?) Obviously it's a bonus for you if there is a great Latin American studies department, and something to consider if/when you're choosing which university to attend, but I would definitely not cross off anything at this stage just because they don't have a Latam department* or they have one with a more Brazilian or Caribbean focus or something. *Although I don't actually know how common Latin American studies departments are...perhaps they're so common that not having one is a sign of unique disrespect from the university for that segment of area studies, in which case maybe it's worth crossing such universities off? That's not my general impression, but I'm no expert. Also, I've found that a really excellent "fit" in anthropology is not common enough that you can go crossing off universities to apply to really easily. That's not the case for every discipline: my impression is that in English, e.g., there might be twenty universities that offer a really great fit for any given research profile, in which case, yeah, you need some way of reducing your application workload. But for us it might be common to find like 8, which I would argue is a good number and not one you need to find reasons to reduce.

It doesn't sound like you need a master's degree in terms of your background, but yeah, what are you interested in? It's possible your interests are broad/in flux enough that you might benefit from one, but in terms of your experience with things related to the field, no, you don't need one. I have no idea about eventual job prospects, but at one of the anthropology program accepted student weekends I attended, all the professors kept moaning that they hadn't accepted enough students over 30 this year, because apparently their methods course is always more interesting when there's a quorum of students with more life experience than I've got.

When faced with a "not as rigorous" option for the beginning level of moderately easy languages, one thing I have done is to self-study a "semester's worth" and then jump in to the next semester of the sequence. Even if the class is moving a little slowly, then, I'm still working on catching up, so it comes out to a fairly quick pace of language learning. And I get the impression that this is less of an issue for other people, but having taken ≤2 semesters of four or five languages, I am also just so incredibly over the "And what did you have for breakfast this morning, fellow student?" "I ate oatmeal for breakfast this morning. What did you have for breakfast this morning, fellow student?" "I ate an egg for breakfast this morning, fellow student." type of practice conversation, so whenever I've had to start languages from scratch, reducing my exposure to that kind of dialogue helps preserve my sanity.

I haven't had an institutional affiliation for a couple years: this has made accessing most scholarship either difficult or impossible. I just downloaded my first scholarly PDF through my new university's library system. This feeling:

Did you not email with your potential advisor after you were admitted but before you committed to attending? If you did, I might let it stand. Or have you registered for courses? "Dear Professor So-and-so, [introductory stuff], I was thinking of taking Courses A and B, but for my third/fourth course [depending on what's normal at your program], I was choosing between C and D. The pros of C would be xyz; the pros of D would be mnp. What do you think?" is also a good, actionable reason to write. (Perhaps I am a lazy beans, but I am not doing reading ahead of time for any of my own courses.) If you haven't corresponded ever, I would send the email, personally.

Has anybody read The Three-Body Problem? More importantly, has anybody read The Dark Forest? I've met 2-3 people who've read the first one, but have never even seen a review on the internet that acknowledges the second. But they are both great!

Of course! I wish you all the best, and I'll be on sporadically to check my PMs for anything you want to send me.

@striped I'm sorry I came down hard on you, because I really didn't like it when people did that to me when I was misconceptualizing some things when I started this process a year and a half ago; at the same time, it ended up being helpful, so thank you for listening and I hope I can eventually be helpful to you also. I misinterpreted what was going on with your background, and now that I understand better I agree that master's programs are be one avenue that could work for you. (I hope my rhetoric about who should go to them was not too harsh...I was a little cranky based on my misconceptions about you, so I was a bit ungenerous in my description of who they serve best, but it sounds like they might serve you well!) I think it sounds like what I would do, if I were you, is do some serious calculating of how much debt is reasonable to take on for a master's—assuming you end up in the 25th percentile or so of outcomes post-PhD, so little money but not worst-case scenario—and then see if I could find master's programs that would come in under that amount. Here's where I am really not that helpful; I have a good handle on what sort of funded or semi-funded master's programs can be recommended in art history, my area studies' languages and literatures, and a couple other more humanities things, but I have no idea about anthropology. I think many programs may offer to waive tuition through a TAship? Do some provide stipends? That's what a lot of my friends in other disciplines have done, but I don't know how it would work in anthropology. It's also just easier to work part-time through a master's if you get it in this country. Anyway, the email problem sounds like you were reaching for help from the wrong source—if you could get detailed application advice from every professor by email, everybody would ask and the professors would have no time left. Two avenues that might work better are 1) emailing professors at your undergraduate institution who got their PhDs recently, because I think "hello I am an alumnus/a/x of University and I need help with thing, even though you don't know me" sometimes tends to get better responses than "hello I am a prospective student at University and..." 2) Send short emails to a couple professors you've met at area talks or are otherwise around your area and ask to get coffee sometime; I've had professors at universities that interested me be much more receptive to "can we talk for twenty minutes/half an hour on this day" than to an unspecified amount of helping time spread out over the internet. Or do you know any students from your university who went on to any form of graduate school? Do feel free to send me your SOP by PM sometime, whether your old one from last cycle or your new one for next year. I'd be happy to help.

Exactly, a CSU master's degree might be a great fit for you. (This is where my lack of specific knowledge of suggestions made me less helpful!) You can get master's degrees in this country for far less than $50k in debt...and if you're going to be earning $15-20k for the subsequent 15-20 years of your life, that really is something you should aim for. Cornell: bad idea. Low-debt master's: good idea. (Not a better idea than working, but both could be good options for you.) Right, I wouldn't have gotten into my program if I'd applied in any of my previous working years or if I'd applied as an undergrad; I think I probably could have gotten into a PhD program in my old humanities field with a different topic I'd been thinking about (one I wouldn't have ended up liking very much) if I'd applied in my second year "off," but the topic I'm actually excited to work on for 7-10 years and my more mature approach to it only coalesced in the June before I applied, i.e. when I was 24. Which is still young, for what it's worth—I know college distorts your sense of age, but having more working/friend peers in their 30s and 40s helped me clear my head of that faulty lens. The two other red flags I saw in your letter was that you'd sent close to a hundred emails to students and faculty across the country (!) and say you've gotten no helpful advice from any of them. That strikes me as a bad sign; were you mass-emailing, or were they recommending things you don't want to do, or what? Can you tell us more about that? The second was that you say you have "literally have no one to help me figure out the best path for my interests." With an anthropology BA from Cornell (or one of the other good liberal arts colleges in the region), how is that possible? Okay, so your one professor was talking too much about "rolls of the dice" and that wasn't very helpful. But surely at some point in your undergrad career you've met a second anthropology professor, even if they were in a field farther removed from your own? "How (or whether) to get into graduate school" is a subject on which almost all of the anthropology professors in your department should be fluent, regardless of what they know about your specific topic, so I would suggest reaching out to the one you knew second best.

Really? Maybe this is just me—and I have gotten heat for this opinion before*—but I think of master's programs as being great solutions for people who are changing fields and/or got noncompetitive degrees, i.e. graduated with very poor grades and/or without doing more than about ten pages of original research in a single project. If you haven't done significant research in your intended field and/or topic, a lot of the time, master's programs seem like great idea. But you have an anthropology BA, and that final-semester project you did sounds like a great introduction to independent research, and it was on a subject very close to the topic you intend to pursue. It seems like you're actually way ahead of the research curve: at the time of application, I had done three hours of ethnographic fieldwork. So because you do have that foundation, I'm not really understanding what more a master's degree would get you. *I got a bit of a drubbing from another poster for thinking I was "too good" to apply to master's degrees, so don't worry, opinions on this definitely go both ways. "Everybody on here" is definitely not opposed to them. That said, of course getting a master's in London would be wonderful if it were paid for, but since the US options for that are by and large limited to Fulbright/Rhodes/Marshall, it's not a course of action I feel comfortable flat-out recommending. But if you really think you need a master's degree, you might try getting one that is less prestigious than either LSE or Cornell—there are more schools than that in the world!—but that would pay you with a TAship to attend. If I can be frank, I have some wealthy friends who, when confronted after college with too many choices to pick their ideal career within their first three months on the job market, panicked and had their parents pay tens of thousands of dollars for master's degrees, often in Britain. Now, you may not be in that situation, but when I see high-prestige, expensive master's degrees without a source of funding specified, those friends are my basis for comparison as I hm and tsk to myself and think a little bit less of that CV. I have no doubt that this is a minority opinion in academia; nevertheless, $50k is a rather expensive way to broaden your horizons. You might be rewarded for your investment, because many things in academia reward access to abundant capital; I've taken advantage of that by saving up and paying for the night classes that I believe legitimized my application, but I should stop there because nobody wants to hear all my feelings on the subject. So, what are your interests? Women and gender studies? The environment? Politics? Are you searching for jobs in non-profits in that field, especially those that aren't based out of San Diego universities? It's an election year, so everybody is even more active than usual; I wonder if you could find a non-academic job in something vaguely related to your interests. Many to all of those non-profit jobs are low-to-no-pay, so I understand if you need something better remunerated than that, but perhaps campaigning for some ballot measure on the weekends would help you feel like you were staying connected to your end goals.

Hello @rising_star! Nice of you to think of me. Striped, what's your actual academic background? That's what interests me most here. I came from a non-anthropology background, too, but I'd dabbled in anthropology for a couple courses and, I think more critically, had done a few projects that were really deep (for an undergraduate) research experiences on the region and themes I'm working on. So while I had to switch the humanities frame with which I approached those themes to a more anthropological one, I could keep a lot of my subject knowledge and language skills. Do you have anything like that? Or are your interests all new, and entirely unconnected to what you studied in college? It's sounding like the second one, in which case I agree with you that you should be looking into master's degrees, among other options. However, I am not at all convinced that LSE is the right choice for you. Are there funded master's degrees in anthropology here in the US? Or even ones that waive tuition? I don't know that, which is a critical piece to the advice I'm giving, but if you can find some, I would strongly suggest that you apply to those. Moreover, you're an anthropologist of the United States and you want to get your master's in London? Why? Why would you want to go to a program whose faculty list you can't find? Be flexible about the composition of the faculty of your program, but surely it would behoove you to check out programs that have people who work on questions that are in the same ballpark as the ones you want to focus on. Moreover, I assume based on some of your information that you're either a citizen of or have a green card for the United States—it will be much easier for you to make some money on the side of an American master's degree than in London, where you will not be on a work-eligible visa, which would help limit your debt. (Unless I dramatically misunderstand UK immigration norms.) Given PhD stipends, let alone the likelihood of ending up on miserable adjunct wages for years if not indefinitely afterward, $50,000 of (new) debt is A LOT. I don't feel like advising you not to go into ANY (more) debt for this, but I think you should try to limit it to significantly less than $50,000. I'm less sure than rising about the potential utility of qualitative research jobs for figuring out this sort of more high-level stuff. For my first two years out of college, I worked in a qualitative research-cum-other responsibilities sort of job, and none of my research had any bearing on anything I am now doing. I just re-grounded myself in my questions by hitting a nearby academic library a lot; it wasn't very exciting, but it worked out pretty well. Are you employed currently? In what sort of situation? I've heard people recommend academic night classes, but my experience is limited to night language classes. On the other hand, if you can find a qualitative research job that would help inform you on your questions (mine didn't), that would obviously be helpful. I definitely second the recommendation to talk to your professors, although if we're in a "I was a chemistry major, all of my electives were art practicums, and now I want to focus on the anthropology of [something related to neither chemistry nor art]" situation, I realize you might not have an established relationship to draw on. If you do have those relationships, ask them; even if you don't, the faculty member whose interests most align with your own is still worth reaching out to for advice.

You're absolutely right, the OP asked for some linguistics reading recommendations! You'll notice, though, that they also asked for books about refugees.

China Miéville, Embassytown I did not like the ending—so feel free to come back and yell about it with me—but it is a stunningly original piece of science fiction that takes language as its central conceit. I would look for something to compare it to, but I don't know of anything that would work. I'm not sure what the actual linguists think of it, but I know a linguistic anthropologist who likes it. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao A very well-written novel about two children of a refugee from the Dominican Republic (and about their refugee mother, too). It has language issues in it, and also gives a gripping history of the DR in the twentieth century.

Right so I'm just another incoming graduate student who likes to pretend she knows what she's talking about, but why wouldn't you be able to pursue both for a while? Will you have a class with the other professor? I have very defined research interests, but even I'm not expecting to or interested in writing every paper in every course on that subject. I am not going into academia because I want to write the dissertation I proposed in my statements—I'm going into academia because that was one of many research projects that excites me. Graduate school sounds like a great time to explore some of those other interests on the side, even as I pursue my main project. Anyway, how else would they expect you to develop follow-up projects for after the dissertation, which they do, if they start off your graduate training by forbidding you from thinking through those interests?

There's a lot going on here, so I'm just going to tackle a couple aspects! Yeah, so, I strongly disagree with the premise lurking in there that competitive has to mean ready. It absolutely sounds like you're competitive, but I'm not sure that you feel ready. Are you still taking classes? I'd try to give yourself at least three weeks to recuperate between the end of your last class and when you start thinking about this more seriously; enforcing that "not now" boundary with your research always lets me bring a clearer head to it, personally. So I actually took three years "off," which sounds like maybe more than you need, but it worked for me. Can I also express my surprise that your professors aren't encouraging researchy jobs for you/seem to think that's uncommon? To be fair, I basically know nobody in science at this point, but I do have some dozen friends in medical school, and probably 60-70% of them seemed to work in labs during a year off. Is there no overlap between that sort of research assistant position and the ones that would help somebody in cell bio, for example? I really have no idea, but just throwing it out there. As for me, I now have very focused research interests; they just happen not to fit well in one academic discipline. So dealing with my recommenders on that was kind of a "Look, chums, I am interested in using X method on Y subject, and since many X programs do not have any faculty on subject Y and vice versa, I will be applying to programs in both X and Y (and one interdisciplinary thing)." That was fine, although it still led to some "you sent the X letter to the Y program???" hair-pulling moments for me (I had a much stronger background in one field than the other), which were eventually all resolved successfully. (Department administrators: they have a lot of power.) The professor who knew me the least sent the same letter across all the fields to which I applied, but I wouldn't have wanted to navigate the other two professors through more than 2.1 fields.

If you were competitive for good PhD programs already, will having a funded MPP really make you less competitive for admissions in the future? I happen not to believe that any degree narrows your options (if there's no debt involved), as long as you're flexible with it. If you only apply to jobs that REQUIRE an MPP or PhD, sure, that might narrow your options, since almost nobody lists jobs like that, but there are a lot of jobs where it'll be a bonus. Are these research jobs that cyclical? I don't understand your description of your job market—your chance of finding a research job is "gone" (forever? by September? what?), but maybe you should withdraw from the MPP to enter the job market (which job market?) Corollary: start actually looking for jobs before you decide about the MPP; if there's truly nothing being advertised at this time of year, that's an argument in favor of the MPP, but if there are lots of tempting things, it will do the MPP no harm for you to withdraw in a month rather than today. At my PhD program—which is admittedly in on the less straight-laced side of the social sciences, unlike polisci—all the professors were complaining that they were afraid too few incoming students would be over 30-35. They were upset by the idea of a class of 22-year-olds. You have plenty of time. PS, that immigrants comment: gross. Don't fetishize people like that.

This is going to be different for everybody—e.g., I found all the "block unproductive websites" apps a fun technical challenge to try to get around, not a limit to respect, wasting even more of my time!—and I expect that I'll need to change up a lot of my own strategies next fall, but my last big revelation was that I needed to take MORE breaks. Giving myself more defined-limit, non-screen-time-based breaks lets my brain recharge more in 10 minutes than it would in two hours puttering around on the internet feeling guilty about what I SHOULD be doing. If you get lost doing it, that's no good, but if I go for a short walk, or make myself a cup of coffee and just sit there thinking for as long as I drink it, or do the latest crossword puzzle, I found that I could come back refreshed. Another one I've discovered, last time I had a dresser the right height to use as a reading-only standing desk with my laptop, was that I got a lot more reading done that way because I could dance around to music while reading. That was a surprise, because I find music very annoying if I'm trying to read while sitting down.

Besides my language prep, a disability of mine has started maybe rolling down into yet another slow-motion avalanche, so I get to go on another round of treatment hunting. Whoopee (not).